Retreat #11: Love
The night before I leave for retreat, a profound and bottomless sadness fills my whole being. I don’t know what triggered it. I don’t know what will relieve it. I know that tomorrow I’ll enter solitude, and I dread it. I think about canceling the retreat, but I don’t. I need to face whatever is coming. I go to bed with a heavy heart, and then proceed to have a numinous night.
I float in a sea of sensations. Fire flickers along my skin. This isn’t the heat of a hot flash. Rather than flooding me, it feels like a dance of flashing cells. I get up and go to the washroom. When I return to bed, my husband tells me that my feet and legs are throwing off more heat than he can tolerate. He hugs his side of the bed. I don’t sleep for several hours, lying wide-awake and full of peace. When I fall asleep, I maintain two levels of awareness. I dream of deep blackness laced with lines and beams of light, an ever-changing superstructure of light. It’s as if I’ve entered the world of molecules, and I observe their activities. I feel a rearranging of cells in my body, shifting accompanied by tiny firecracker explosions. On another level, I hear my firsborn come home and go to his room. I feel my husband roll over beside me. I hear my youngest son get up early and shower, then leave for work.
As I emerge from sleep, I am bathed in love. It washes over me, fills me up, dissolves my fears, my boundaries, my very skin. I float in love. Then it begins flowing through me, out from me, penetrating everything that enters my line of vision, stirring love and acceptance within me. The first thing I see is my husband’s back; love rushes through me to him, spilling over him in waves. I perceive him with new eyes. I see him as a human being doing the best he knows how—a human being working to feed himself, a human being longing to be fully himself, afraid that he’s not enough. My eyes take in the furniture, the curtains, the walls and ceiling of the room, the clothing draped over chairs. Everything vibrates, including me.
I expand, become weightless, transparent. Softened. I am pure energy, transformed by the heat of a bellowed fire. I am the liquid bubble at the end of the glass-blower’s tube, shaped by the blower’s breath. Heat glides off me and what emerges is of crystal-clear beauty. In this state, the past, present and future are as they should be. All is complete. All is love. I am love.